Ex-UConn softball player new exec of sports commission

Friday

Ashleigh Bachert seemed destined to be the new executive director of the Jacksonville-Onslow Sports Commission.

Ashleigh Bachert seemed destined to be the new executive director of the Jacksonville-Onslow Sports Commission.

After her husband got a job as an athletic trainer aboard Camp Lejeune, Bachert, who was born in Morehead City and grew up in Durham, wondered what kind of sports-oriented jobs might be available in the Jacksonville area.

Lo and behold, Bachert, who turns 30 on Jan. 3, discovered the sports commission’s top job had just come open.

“Timing-wise, it fit perfectly,” the personable Bachert said during an interview Thursday in the Chamber of Commerce offices. “I couldn’t have asked for a better sign. It kind of felt like it was destined to be.

“I was more intrigued with the fact that I could make an impact on a community through sports, and the fact that I kind of in my eyes was coming back home.”

Bachert, whose first day on the job was Nov. 1, was one of six candidates interviewed by the commission’s board of directors, chairman Mike Carter said. The board, he said, liked Bachert’s background as well as “her enthusiasm for the job and overall knowledge of athletics.”

“The references we checked were stellar,” he added. “She’s a self-starter and go-getter.”

And she was a local choice — sort of.

Bachert is a North Carolinian by birth — she came into the world at Carteret General Hospital in Morehead City. But a year later she moved to Durham, where she attended Northern Durham High School.

She went on to play softball for the University of Connecticut, which was something of a climatic cultural shock for the Southern girl. “The first time it snowed I cried and called my mom and told her I wanted to come back home,” she said.

Recruited as a first baseman, Bachert was moved behind the plate as a freshman after one of the Huskies’ catchers broke her pelvic bone, a move that was even more of a challenge given she is a left-hander.

“So they had to special order my catcher’s mitt,” said Bachert, who hit .223 in her career with 36 RBIs, 12 doubles and 5 home runs. She was also an academic All-American as a junior and a three-time selection to the Big East all-academic team.

The position switch wasn’t all that changed for Bachert at UConn. Her plans to be sports psychologist didn’t pan out, either.

“I really wanted to help other people break the hump and get past themselves and perform better,” she said. “Took a psychology course and hated it. So I knew that wasn’t my forte or calling.”

But her adviser suggest Bachert switch to sports marketing, and that has made all the difference.

“I just fell in love with it,” she said.

Bachert worked under, among others, Rick Thorpe, who went on to become a sales and marketing executive with the PGA Tour and who now works in a similar capacity at Georgia Tech University.

“He made it fun. He made it interesting,” Bachert said. “It was amazing to me that you could have this much of an impact on a group of college kids without being a coach.”

After earning her undergraduate degree in sports marketing at UConn, Bachert went to Southern Miss for her master’s in sports administration and since then has worked for Louisville University and then the University of Indiana.

That experience still resonates with Bachert.

“When I was at Louisville having the opportunity to sell out Freedom Hall for a women’s basketball game, which is kind of unheard of if you’re not Connecticut or Tennessee,” she said. “Watching the girls come through the tunnel as they finally realized that it’s sold out for them and seeing their faces and how happy and how excited they were to play and their passion, it makes it worth it and it hits home that that’s what it’s all about.”

Bachert came to Jacksonville after a three-month stint as fitness facility manager in Bloomington, Ind. And while she’s learning on the run, Bachert has some definite ideas about what she hopes to accomplish with the commission.

“Right now we’re really working on – and this is kind of my marketing background – what are our key sports? Soccer obviously is a huge one here. We kind of hang our hats on soccer,” she said. “Volleyball’s huge.”

So, too, is basketball and football, Bachert said, adding she is still trying to get “a feel” for the county’s “emerging sports.” Among their number is pickleball.

“I’ve been very surprised how big pickleball is in this area. So we’re trying to figure out how do we grow that? How do we bring the Floridians up into our area to participate in our tournament? How do we reach into those retirement community markets?” she said. “Cycling is another big one that the city would like to go after.”

And then there’s the ocean.

“We’re trying to take advantage of the water. It’s an asset not every community has,” she said. “So how do we get the water more involved? So right now it’s a lot of research, trying to figure out what our best fit is. It’s been crazy.”

Along the way, Bachert has had to continue dealing with her own personal issue — cancer.

Just over a year ago Bachert, who was 28 at the time, was diagnosed with melanoma, or skin cancer. The doctors believed it was the result of being out in the sun playing softball as well as time spent in tanning beds.

Also, Bachert said, “some of it does run in the family.”

Her diagnosis came on the same day she buried her grandfather one year ago Wednesday.

“The world stops,” she said. “Luckily I was at home with my family. When I got the news it was an immediate kind of breakdown, but I had an amazing doctor in Indianapolis. My husband had a hard time. You think, ‘OK, I’m going to lose my daughter’s mom.’

“But we had a lot of great support. You learn to appreciate the little moments. It’s been a whirlwind. But there’s some good that’s come out of it.”

Bachert has had two surgeries on her lymph nodes and is now cancer free, although she has to go in for PET scans every six months. Along the way, her husband, Aaron, found out he had stage I melanoma, which Ashleigh said was “topical” and has been removed.

“Everything’s fine,” she said. “Now we kind of made a pact, me and my husband…, we have dead set, hard and fast rules for (their 2 1/2-year-old daughter) Makayla. She will not do this, this and this.”

Through it all, Bachert “held onto running.” A member of Jacksonville’s Asphalt Junkies Running Club, Bachert hated long distance running as a softball player. But she found it was a “great” stress reliever when she went to graduate school.

And today her goal is to run her first marathon by the time she turns 30. She had hoped to run in the Tobacco Trail Marathon on her father’s birthday earlier this year, but her doctors said that was out.

“I had to take six months off,” Bachert said. “So I’ve actually registered for the (Cedar Point) Trial Run in January, and I’ll try to run the Tobacco Trail in March. It’ll be the longest I’ve ever ran.”

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